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Mono @ FOSDEM 2013: Cancelled
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 06 2013 @ 03:22 AM EST

Mono @ FOSDEM 2013: Cancelled

Unfortunately, we’ve had to cancel the Mono Developer Room at FOSDEM 2013. While there was usually a torrent of presentations, this year it seems like everyone was out of ideas.

It's not a great surprise. There was never much serious interest in Mono in its original incarnation. People will point to Banshee, Tomboy, and FSpot, but those were demo programs intended to demonstrate that Mono actually worked. They never really had a life of their own.

Any programming language has to be actually useful to people if it is to achieve any success. When Mono was originally being developed, de Icaza kept changing his target market every six months.

  • First it was supposed to give a free/open source alternative to Java. However, the people doing Java development weren't interested, and when Sun open-sourced Java that raison de'etre evaporated.
  • It was supposed to provide a better development language for Linux desktop developers. But desktop software developers weren't interested, and it ignored the fact that not many companies were using DotNet for major off the shelf Windows desktop apps either.
  • DotNet was used extensively for custom desktop business apps, but Linux developers decided that the web was where such things were going (and they were right). Any strategy that focused on desktop apps was a dead end.
  • It was supposed to allow people to replace their ASP DotNet servers with Mono on Suse, but that flopped as well. Any change required an actual port, since Mono wasn't actually 100% compatible with DotNet. Any software vendor who was using ASP DotNet was unlikely to be someone who was worried about vendor lock-in to begin with. For any individual user who had a bespoke application, it would likely be cheaper to just continuing paying Microsoft's licensing fees than to pay to port their application to Mono (especially since Suse support isn't free either).
  • Not one major Linux vendor outside of Novell showed any interest in Mono as anything other than the required run-time for Banshee/FSpot/Tomboy. Everybody except Novell saw that there was really no demand for it.

The only real success story for Mono seems to be as an alternative to DotNet for game makers who think that Microsoft's licensing costs for product embedding are too high. That's a pretty narrow niche market, and I would have to question whether development is financially sustainable on that basis.

De Icaza is currently trying to flog it (via Xamarin) as a cross platform app platform for mobile, but I really have to question the rational of doing mobile app development using a language that isn't native to any of the major platforms. If you are developing a mobile app and try to Google some example code for a problem you are working on, you will find plenty of examples using Objective-C, Java, or even C++, but nothing using C#. You will then have to bash your head against your desk because you won't know if your app isn't working because of something you are doing wrong, or if it's just (another) bug in Mono. An Objective-C compiler for Android, or a Java compiler for iOS might have made sense, but choosing C# is mind boggling. If you are a desktop Windows programmer and are trying to get into mobile app development, learning a new language is going to be the least of your problems. Hobbling yourself by cutting yourself off from virtually all of the existing help and documentation for the major platforms is simply making things as difficult as possible.

Mono failed, and anybody who looked objectively at it in the early days could have predicted its failure. The "anti-Mono" propaganda had nothing to do with this failure, as the success of Java (which was originally closed source) shows. The real failure was that Mono was a solution looking for a problem. DotNet was a solution that was focused on Microsoft's traditional markets, while Linux companies were off doing other things, like building the Internet, the Cloud, and mobile. That's the problem with cloning someone else's product. If their product is a dead end, so is your clone.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

BlackBerry launches new Z10 phone across Canada
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 06 2013 @ 06:41 AM EST
"This past year, our sector spent almost $30 billion in courtrooms — particularly in U.S. courtrooms — defending cases against non-practicing entities — or 'patent trolls' — who produce nothing," he said in prepared remarks.
Response from the Patent Trolls: "This past year, our industry did spectacularly well: generating over $30 billion in new business in the U.S alone!"

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Patent Reform, System Should Be Abolished
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 06 2013 @ 01:43 PM EST
HuffPo

Same guys who released last year it as a working paper.
Comments here at the time wondered what was in the St Louis water,
or was it just Fed Reserve blue sky blasphemy ...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

800 million Android smartphones, 300 million iPhones in active use by December 2013, study says
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 06 2013 @ 02:05 PM EST

That's truly amusing. The article contains:

1.4 billion smartphones will be in use: 798 million of them will run Android, 294 million will run Apple’s iOS, and 45 million will run Windows Phone
Percentage wise:
    57% Android, 21% Apple, 3.2% Windows - I guess blackberry and others gets the final 18.8%
That's very amusing in context of the previous article and it's apparent* conclusions:
    32% Windows, 26% Apple, 12% Android, 30% other
I suppose we could just take a look at the totals of how many devices are currently activated/used (if there's trustworthy mechanisms in place to count those) and see which percentages are likely closer to the reality.

Amusing that Windows/Android swings so drastically while Apple is pretty stable (relatively).


*: Don't know where the numbers come from, they were part of the discussion in a thread in the recent article with SCOg and the bankruptcy Court. It could have come from a similar article or the actual research document or some other source, I never bothered to verify as I don't have much interest in the "research predictions" as they are usually so detached from reality they're not worth considering - my humble opinion ;)

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

When . Will . They . Ever . Learn ?
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 06 2013 @ 02:20 PM EST
A conversation between the Supreme Court & the Federal Circuit
In other words, the Supreme Court is saying to the Federal Circuit, we disagree with everything you have ever had to say about [patentable subject matter] in your thirty-year history. The Federal Circuit, however, continues to push back.
...
The fact that two agencies of the same administration (PTO and Justice) have taken opposing positions on [DNA patents] is itself an indication that reasonable minds can differ.
Did Soverain [Newspick, 27 January 2013] come too late for the author of that Scotusblog? Or was Soverain just an abberation from excess christmas cranberry sauce? Surely the CAFC bench can't be afraid for their seats under a second term President. Maybe they're just afraid of an increasing workload?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Microsoft's Dell loan - unintended consequences
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 06 2013 @ 02:33 PM EST
While Microsoft might find itself somewhat successful in influencing Dell to
avoid Android with its loan deal, there may be unintended consequences. For
instance, Dell's past decision to sell a netbook with Ubuntu pre-installed led
me to not only buy a netbook from them, but also to buy two other non-Linux
systems. (Of course, immediately upon receipt I reformatted the discs, tore off
the Windows stickers and installed Linux on them.)

Dell's more recent decision to drop Android tablets and replace them with
Microsoft ones had made me quite wary of doing business with Dell at all.

Making matters worse, Microsoft's new requirement that all Windows 8 compatible
computers have a restricted BIOS have caused me to completely avoid all such
computers altogether.

I recently purchased one new system from System76 and another from ZaReason
specifically due to these concerns. I do not want to find myself locked-in and
I wish to support companies that give me freedom.

While the unintended consequences may be small by Microsoft's and Dell's
standards, they have been very real in my case.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Packets of Death
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 06 2013 @ 07:08 PM EST
Fascinating firmware debugging of Intel 82574L ethernet controller.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Rumor: Microsoft looking to release Office for Linux in 2014
Authored by: kjs on Wednesday, February 06 2013 @ 11:53 PM EST
Who wants to have this bloatware in a Linux system? It consumes more space than
the rest of the entire GNU/Linux and with LibreOffice who needs the bugware with
a ribbon which covers 1/4 of the usable screen size?
Guess they think they can attract companies which found out that Linux is a much
cheaper and more stable alternative.
Interesting that they went public in Europe where a lot more companies than in
the US ditched winDOS already.

>kjs

---
not f'd, you won't find me on farcebook

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Connectors, controversy and the LGPL
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 07 2013 @ 05:21 AM EST

Now he's finally got it right. Rather than trying to force Sun/Oracle to
re-
license their connectors, he has always been free to write his
own.

Wayne
http://madhatter.ca

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Massive search fraud botnet seized by Microsoft and Symantec
Authored by: luvr on Thursday, February 07 2013 @ 07:01 AM EST
Massive search fraud botnet seized by Microsoft and Symantec
“We're taking control of the command and control network so that every time someone types in a search query, they're going to get redirected to a page directly by Microsoft.”
Gulp... If I ever had this happen to me, I would assume a serious computer virus infection, turn off the computer, wipe the disk clean, and do a fresh install.

Let's hope that they're doing this only to those systems that are infected by Bamital in the first place. They would, then, at least do something right.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Why Michael Dell Really Had to Take Dell Private
Authored by: jbb on Thursday, February 07 2013 @ 12:53 PM EST
link

The worst-case scenario for Michael Dell would have occurred if an activist shareholder had gotten into the mix. Dell would have faced the prospect of being kicked out of the company that bears his name. I’m certain this is why Dell went private.
Or, maybe it's to avoid public/stockholder scrutiny as Microsoft drives yet another hardware partner into the ground. Do you think Microsoft learned nothing from the Nokia fiasco?

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Ortiz Fumbles Again
Authored by: matth on Thursday, February 07 2013 @ 05:40 PM EST
Ortiz' office helps arrest the wrong guy

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Using exploits is theft
Authored by: RichardB on Thursday, February 07 2013 @ 07:03 PM EST
I don't take it too seriously but the BBC has found 'an intellectual property expert' that claims using an exploit could be classed as theft. The logic is you could have bought in game credits for real money, so using an item duping exploit is like stealing. I can't see any judge going for that.

However, that anyone could consider that cheating in a single-player game is a criminal matter shows that something is awfully wrong somewhere.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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